Sprint on May 2 asked the West Virginia Public Service Commission to review the deal. AT&T in a May 12 filing asked the agency to reject that request, saying Sprint offers limited service in the state.

The states should indeed be reviewing the deal, and companies should not have the power to reject proper review. Simple as that.

The good ol’ US of A ranked ninth (out of the 29 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) in fixed broadband penetration on a per capita basis, and 12th in terms of pure percentage — behind the UK, South Korea, Iceland, the Netherlands, and plenty of others….Worse still, even those with broadband reported slower connections than folks in other countries. Olympia, Washington had the highest average download speeds of any US city with 21Mbps (New York and Seattle tied for second with 11.7Mbps), but was easily topped by Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, and Seoul (35.8Mbps).

This is what happens AT&T and the cable companies can get away with whatever they want, folks.

“I will neither sign nor veto this will,” Perdue said in a statement. “Instead, I call on the General Assembly to revisit this issue and adopt rules that not only promote fairness but also allow for the greatest number of high quality and affordable broadband options for consumers.”

If a governor does not veto a bill, it will automatically become law. By not signing it, Perdue is symbolically signaling her displeasure.

Or…veto it and make the Legislature try again. But that would require actually having balls and using them.

So a few days ago I posted this article. It was admittedly a departure over what I usually post, since this site isn’t usually about Apple rumors. However, it is about competition and Sprint getting the iPhone is relevant since it would help to even the mobile device playing field.

Anyway, the article was originally linked on Reddit but didn’t really get much traction. Or so I thought. Within a few hours it ended up on MacRumors and it spiraled up from there. And then Apple changed the job posting, heh.

﻿Engadget posted some very interesting insight about the hearing that happened in Congress recently. A few bits of discussion:

One of the primary concerns in the hearing was determining whether or not AT&T actually has enough spectrum on its own. Think of spectrum like the number of lanes on a busy highway: during rush hour these highways get clogged up and causes traffic to slow to a crawl, but when more lanes are added, more traffic can be accommodated. Stephenson argues that one of the major reasons his company needed to purchase T-Mobile is to have enough spectrum to properly build out its upcoming LTE network.

Block B – AT&T Mobility was the biggest buyer in the B block, with 227 licenses totaling $6.6 billion. U.S. Cellular and Verizon bought 127 and 77 licenses, respectively. AT&T Mobility and Verizon Wireless bought licenses around the country, while U.S. Cellular continued with its strategy to buy licenses in northern regions. [18]

This doesn’t sound like a company that’s particularly hurting for spectrum to me.

But the real reason why this is a bad idea is because this effectively creates a GSM monopoly in the United States. AT&T will be the one who gets all of the roaming revenue from foreign visitors, vs. the current situation, for one thing. (AT&T and T-Mobile are the two national GSM carriers in this country.) Not to mention that Verizon and AT&T combined will end up controlling 80% of the US mobile phone market in general.

Location Kansas City, MO
…
Member of the Carrier Engineering team that supports taking products through technical approval at the carriers. A Carrier Engineer team is responsible for day-to-day technical interactions with the one or more carriers to track down issues reported by the carrier, assist the carrier with testing they might be conducting and working with program management, software development and test teams to get products approved by the carriers.

Combined with the rumors floating around, this sounds like a Sprint iPhone is a possibility. (Note: Sprint is based in the Kansas City area, hence the Apple job posting.)

Sprint will definitely need the iPhone if the AT&T/T-Mobile merger goes through to stay relevant, so this could be very good news for them.

Sadly, AT&T’s still going through with their ill-thought broadband cap plan. I kinda figured this would happen, but man, this sucks. And because of the lack of competition in the US ISP space, shareholders of Time Warner Cable and other capless ISPs will get pissed off unless they adopt caps too. The upside is that 250GB seems to be the number that doesn’t piss people off. For now.

Because of this, I’m not going to rely on TWC to remain capless for long, really. I have a plan to possibly bring much better Internet access to the condominium complex that I’m an owner in, but I’m still working out the details and I still need to sell the Board on it. I’ll keep you all updated.